The New York-based firm is backing a new quant fund from Eric
Tavel, who previously worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management
and the Canadian bank RBC.

Schonfeld is seeding its new quant investment with $100 million.
The new firm, Masa Capital, plans to launch in the first half of
next year with as much as $150 million under management,
including Tavel's own cash.

Tavel headed RBC's quant proprietary trading group, GAT,
from 2010 through last year, according to a LinkedIn page. He
oversaw Goldman's quantitative investment strategies group and
comanaged the Global Alpha Fund from 1996 through 2010, according
to a Schonfeld press statement.

The new fund will focus on quant
trading in futures and currencies, among other strategies, Tavel
told Business Insider.

While Schonfeld already runs
quant strategies in its book, chief investment officer Ryan
Tolkin said the new addition would help the firm
diversify.

"Many of our strategies are
statistical arbitrage strategies," Tolkin said. "That basically
means relying or using historical pricing information to help
predict future price movement of stocks. Many of them are equity
based, and what Eric is doing differently is trading different
asset classes from a quantitative perspective."

REUTERS/Tyrone
Siu

Schonfeld managed about $4
billion, including leverage, at the start of the year, according
to a regulatory filing. That means Masa will make up a tiny bit
of the firm's overall portfolio when it launches, but the move to
back Masa coincides with Schonfeld's backing and acquisition of
more talent, Tolkin said.

The launch comes as more asset
managers push into quant investing.

Steve Cohen, for instance, is
investing
$250 million in a Boston-based quant firm, Quantopian,which makes trades based on
algorithms sent by thousands of traders. Cohen's family office,
Point72 Asset Management, which manages his billions, already has
a separate quant arm called Cubist Systematic Strategies.

Correction: This article
originally said that Schonfeld managed $4 billion excluding
leverage, according to a regulatory filing. That figure includes
leverage.